Journey into Investing

Weekly Recap: Overall this week was a loser as the portfolio end up down 4.33% for the week or $112.68.  I think today was the only day this week that the portfolio was in the green.  Overall you will not see much in the way of addition to the portfolio except in the reinvestment of dividends as I have started on a Total Money Makeover to get myself out of debt and make it so I can really build wealth once I stop putting money in someone else's pocket.  A deep dive into the finances and seeing a number just north of $70K for debt not including my home is just way too much.  When the economy is good you just take things for granted and after seeing the blood bath in the jobs market I want to get to a point where I don't have to worry about job security they way I have the last couple of month.  I have been lucky and am still employed, but after watching my company downsize our work force by 20% last month it was a real wake up call.  Portfolio Additions/Subtractions: After waiti

Back in December Robinhood announced that they were introducing Fractional Shares and launching the feature as an early access shortly after making the announcement.  They also claimed that it would roll out to all users early in 2020.  So I added my name to the wait list and patiently waited for my turn to get access to the feature. Well today was finally the day that Robinhood turned on the feature for my account and I couldn't be happier.  You might be asking why I was so excited to get this feature.  There are a couple of reasons that I wanted this feature, so lets take a look at those reasons. More options and Flexibility: How do fractional shares give you more options you might ask?  If you are like me you don't have larges amounts of cash laying around that you can drop into an investment account to get started.  For me I am currently depositing about $100 a month into my Robinhood account until I am able to wipe out my debt.  So if I wanted to buy 1 share of Apple for e

Over the last couple of months I have been taking a long look at mine and my families financial future.  A lot of time has been spent looking at investments and how I can build a passive income that can provide financial support in retirement.  The deep I look at my finances and try to find more money to invest in my future the more I have realized that my debt is really an anchor.   Debt is an anchor that can really limit your ability to build financial freedom.  Why do I say that, well just think about the amount of money you spend on interest each month.  If you haven't thought about the interest then take a few minutes to added up the monthly interest you are paying.  This is money that you are putting in someone else's pocket.  Have you looked at your credit card bills lately and looked at how long and how much it would cost you if all you did was pay the minimum monthly payment?  I have known for several years that I was carrying too much debt, and by the end of the month

Weekly Recap: Another up and down week in the market that saw my Robinhood portfolio following suit.  A strong trading day on Friday had my portfolio update $58.66 or 2.29% for the week.   I have also been taking a deep look at my finances over the last week and while I would love to continue trying to dump as much money as possible into my portfolio, I have realized that while investing is a good thing it is kind of a wash with gain if I continue to carry my current debt load.  So I have begun working on a plan to accelerate paying off all my debt minus my mortgage as fast as possible.  So with that said I will be sticking to only depositing $100 a month into this account and diverting every thing possible to paying off my debt.  Why pay a credit card company 14-20% in interest while only getting back maybe 4% from investments.  Once the debt is paid off them I can really start growing my investment accounts at a much more rapid pace.   Portfolio Status: So what has changed with

Today I want to take a look at building out a spreadsheet that I can use to track all my investments in one place.  I have multiple accounts and going from site to site to check my investments sucks, so I want to track everything on a single spreadsheet.  Originally I was going to go with Microsoft excel for my spreadsheet of choice, but finally decided to the use Google Sheets mostly due to portability and cost. Let's just right in and start by going to google sheets and creating a new blank spreadsheet. Google sheets has some built in functionality that will allow you to pull in financial data, but lets start by setting up columns headers. This is the basic list of information that I want to track to start off with, but there is still information that related to dividends that will be a little more tricky and will require access to data that can't be easily pulled within Google sheets. Now I will breakdown each column and talk about how to set up them up

This week was pretty much a wash overall.  The week started off good as my portfolio value was up by around $117 by the close of Wednesday, but come the end of the week all the gains were gone and then some.  For the week I was actually down $23.  With that said that did not stop me from making some additions to my portfolio. Purchases: Realty Income( O ): I bought 5 shares of Realty at $50.45 which is currently down about 33% over the last three months with most of that coming during the crash in March.  Realty Income is a Real Estate Investment Trust or REIT and REIT's usually maintain higher dividend yields due to the fact that they are required to pay out 90% of taxable income back to shareholders.  I see the potential to earn via growth in the stock price as well as the bonus of the dividend that is paid out on a monthly basis. Alerian MLP ETF( AMLP ): I bought 10 shares of Alerian at $4.63.  Alerian is an Exchange Traded Fund or ETF that tracks market cap weighted